THE SOLIDARITY DECADE 489stretched for miles. Solidarity stewards kept cheerful order. Watfsa and his
associates toured the country to rally spirits. No major disturbances were
recorded.
The bread queues of 1980— 1 turned into the biggest social, political, and his-
torical seminar that Poles have ever attended. The mood deteriorated when
meat rationing was introduced. In every town and city, people stoically stand-
ing together day after day, rain or shine, talked about anything and everything,
and from their common hardship developed a strong sense of togetherness.
They talked about their families' experiences during the War and under
Stalinism; they talked about the glaring contrast between their own knowledge
and the false information still served up by the state-censored media; and they
talked openly about the cruelties and corruption of the ruling regime. (They
couldn't help but notice, for example, that Party comrades who had access to
private Party shops with preferential supplies, did not have to stand in line with
ordinary folk.) Above all, they told jokes. Polish political humour came into its
own. 'What word is the same in English and in Polish?' they would ask. And the
answer was 'meat' (a synonym for the Polish mit or 'myth'). Nothing could have
been more corrosive of the Party's reputation. The Censorship was irrelevant.
After thirty-five years of so-called 'socialist progress', everyone could see that
the Communist system had failed.
In this strange atmosphere, where political relaxation mingled with economic
hardship, many of the restraints on cultural life collapsed. Publishers, theatre
directors, artistic patrons, and film-makers found the courage to produce and to
promote the sort of books, shows, and events which the Communist apparatus
would never have tolerated in normal times. A demoralized Party establishment
could not find the strength to stop them. One of the most sensational events was
the return to Poland of Czeslaw Milosz (b. 1911) who won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1980. An emigre poet, author of the devastating analysis of
Communist cultural policy, The Captive Mind (1953), and son of the lost
Eastern Borderlands, was turned overnight into a national celebrity. For years,
he had lingered in the Censorship's lowest category of villains, who could not
even be mentioned to be denounced. And now, suddenly, his name was on
everyone's lips, his collected poems on every student's reading list. No less sen-
sational was the unrestricted release of Andrzej Wajda's two dissident films
Man of Iron (1981) and Man of Marble (1977). Though the latter film had cir-
culated earlier in limited circles, the two films now appeared together in every
cinema in the land; and they constituted the most telling indictment to which the
Communist myth had ever been exposed. Their theme was the post-war history
of Poland's working class. And their chilling message underlined the fact that
most of the terrible ordeals and sacrifices of the past three decades, patiently
borne in the hope of a better future, had largely been in vain.
Poland suffered two severe blows in May 1981, when Cardinal Wyszynski
died and when an attempt was made to assassinate the Pope. For twenty-five
years, the Primate of the Polish Church had exercised enormous influence in